Introducing “Unidentified”

It’s time to move forward to an introduction of my new book, which should be available this month (June). I’ll return to the topic of Russian covert political action – which is nothing new but is currently being treated in a fashion which undoubtedly has the entire intelligence community butting its head against the wall. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the like of the current Executive and Congressional communities’ willful ignorance in regard to a subject of national security – especially from the political wing that used to dote on exactly these sorts of threats.

Strangely enough, I’ve still received no calls from either arm of government requesting my input so in the interim I’ll try to provide a bit better picture of what is in my newest work (some 455 pages of it), “Unidentified / The National Intelligence Challenge of UFOs”. We have tried to capture the gist of it in the press release (which is still pending, held for actual availability). To quote the release:

“There is simply no doubt that unidentified aerial objects were taken seriously by military intelligence. Over some three decades both military and civilian intelligence groups used the standard methods of conventional and technical intelligence to resolve what was officially stated to be a serious security and air defense problem. Those well-established methods failed, frustrating those involved in investigations and creating serious public relations and credibility problems for the U.S. Air Force. Ultimately the only solution to the UFO problem was to simply abandon it. In the end the intelligence challenge of highly anomalous “unknowns” – unconventional aerial objects internally and confidentially described in both Air Force and CIA reports as national security threats – had literally beaten the system.

Unidentified explores that intelligence failure, beginning during World War II and continuing over some three decades of official inquiries. It also profiles the events – including inter-service and inter-agency political posturing – which prevented the problem from being elevated to a level of true national security tasking. The ongoing Air Force decision to study the problem only at the level of individual incidents and the larger failure to task the broader intelligence community with a longer term, strategic analysis of security related UFO activities ensured that the fundamental problem was simply not addressed. The end result was nothing more than over a thousand highly unconventional and anomalous UFO reports officially classified and archived as “Unknowns”.

In Unidentified, Larry Hancock turns to the strategic intelligence practices – better known as indications analysis – that were not tasked to the national intelligence community. He presents a series of indications studies which suggest something very different from the official statement on UFOs officially offered by the Air Force. In these studies Unidentified examines and details patterns of UFO activity strongly suggesting that “unknown parties” actively probed America’s strategic military capabilities – at the same time demonstrating an undeniable ability to project force against the nation’s atomic warfighting complex. Beyond that, the operational patterns in the UFO activities revealed in the analysis also suggest a clear effort at “messaging”, one which appears to have failed.”

Now I have to say it’s not easy to capture the full content of this book in three or four paragraphs of a press release. However I’ve just finished the first few interviews on it and one is already up on Facebook. The host did a wonderful job with it and I think it would give anyone a good feel for what I’m doing with Unidentified. If you are interested take a listen:

If you do, you’ll notice the host was very interested in a series of Air Force and CIA quotes I present and discuss in the book. In my next post I will elaborate further on those and their significance.

Advertisements

Share this:

Like this:

Related

About Larry Hancock

Larry Hancock is a leading historian-researcher in the JFK assassination. Co-author with Connie Kritzberg of November Patriots and author of the 2003 research analysis publication titled also Someone Would Have Talked. In addition, Hancock has published several document collections addressing the 112th Army Intelligence Group, John Martino, and Richard Case Nagell. In 2000, Hancock received the prestigious Mary Ferrell New Frontier Award for the contribution of new evidence in the Kennedy assassination case. In 2001, he was also awarded the Mary Ferrell Legacy Award for his contributions of documents released under the JFK Act.

I agree, although getting a reasonably secure dataset to work with is very problematic (most ‘unknowns’ would be better classified as ‘insufficient information but several dozen cases seem to me to stand up to scrutiny).
The thought occurred to me a while ago that the pattern of behaviour could be interpreted as an ambiguous strategy, carefully staying below a threshold that would precipitate widespread recognition but making a non too subtle point to to governments.
The case by case approach adopted by Blue Book etc would be curiously inadequate if that was the totality of it. There do appear to be indications of a second layer to the investigation in that time period focused on the RDB. This suggestion is based on:
a) The Smith memo and subsequent investigation of the original sources for this.
b) Ruppelt’s reference to such a group in his chapter on the Lubbock Lights.
c) Ruppelt’s reference to an information flow into Research and Development via an unnamed Major General usually present at his regular briefings at the Pentagon (in the chapter dealing with the build up to the 1952 wave)
(Ralph Clark’s associations with RDB and the 1952 CIA investigation might also fit into this…not sure yet).

All this suggests to me a possible role for BB as an initial filter for a more serious study we can only glimpse a trace of.

In regard to the data set, fortunately I use a technique developed specifically for studies where individual observations cannot be totally confirmed, it was developed specifically for competitive situations where you have to assume your opponent is at least to some extent trying to shield or obscure elements of their activities and especially their intentions. When combined with a tight focus on documented military and security type observations, it resolves many of the issues you face when trying to deal with the immensity of tens of thousands of UFO reports (not to mention the hoaxes and other related elements of weirdness that come with this subject).

I think you will find the book deals with each of the points you listed – as well as the fact that when you enter the broader world of the full national intelligence community, agency/service territorial infighting and career concerns are almost as significant as they are in academia…grin.

To a limited extent yes, but since I don’t have a team working with me its a minimalist version. I set up four separate hypotheses as part of the process – at least two of them are competing but the others are elaborations/extensions of the baseline hypothesis. In a way they do each compete with each other as well as the baseline.

The technique has elements of ACH but because it deals with a much longer chronology/timeline, some 22 years, it has far more elements of trend and pattern analysis. The technique is called derived from strategic warnings analysis, referred to as indications analysis. Its used in business for strategic business planning and marketing planning which is where I first became involved with it long ago. I go through the logic of the process in the book which might make that part a bit dry in places but if you want to cut through all the noise its necessary; the same is true earlier in the book where I explore why the subject was never tasked by the NSC for strategic analysis. You have to get into the legalities, practices and political quagmire of that to really appreciate what went down – and that can get a bit dull in spots (sort of like internal agency memos…grin).

Generally speaking the book is a study of what happened over time within the intelligence community and why certain advanced analysis was not conducted; then I try my own hand and some of the practices that might have applied as an illustration. And all that takes about 465 pages at last count.

Thanks Stephen, I can promise that it will be a different sort of UFO book, very tightly focused but still covering enough years to allow clear patterns and trends to emerge. Now that we can see what the various intelligence services were doing both at field and headquarters level things become much clearer. That was the first thing I had to get my head around; once you see what they are saying internally vs. to the public, reality begins to set in – then when you realize that for a variety of very practical reasons they were unable to use conventional technical intelligence techniques to resolve the problem you see the trap that emerged.

It became a systemic failure of conventional intelligence practices which could only be solved by kicking it out of the box they were working in – but that would have required both career risks and what some of my long ago cultural anthropology instructors might have called “tribal issues”…grin.

Yet once you move it into a new box and apply a different set of techniques, ones specifically designed for just that sort of data, its possible test some very interesting hypotheses. I’m more than eager to discuss my findings, just can’t wait to get the book in people’s hands. I have little doubt there will be push back of various sorts, things should get pretty interesting – just in time for the along about the 70th anniversary of the summer of 1947 (which happens to be my 70th as well).